Why Little Miss Sunshine Will Take Home the Prize

By Michael F.

Notre Dame Secondary School
Brampton

[Written on Saturday, February 19, 2007 - one week before the Oscars of 2007]

Dwayne, the only son, wants to be a pilot more than anything in the world. He has taken an oath of silence for weeks, vowing not to speak until he passes his initiation test. While driving across America, he is informed by his uncle that he can never become a pilot, because of the fact that he is colour blind. Dwayne, consumed with rage, runs out of the car and into a large ditch, swearing profusely. The mother tries to reason with him, to get back in the car but he refuses. It seems there is nothing in the world that can get back Dwayne back in the car, and I was wondering how the movie would handle this situation while remaining credible. The family does not know what to do. Then, the idea is suggested that little Olive, the boy's sister, should go and talk to him. She makes her way down the ditch and comes up behind Dwayne. She merely sits beside him and puts her small little arm around his neck. They are silent for about ten of fifteen seconds before Dwayne utters: "Let's go."

This is one of the most poignant scenes I have ever seen in any movie. Instead of resorting to sentimental clichés used by lesser movies, Little Miss Sunshine proves that it is more intelligent, and more real-to-life. The film is about many things: It's about the winners and the losers, family, friends, relationships, morals vs. values, and, above all else, it is about North America—the way we think, act and function. It is also, in this humble reviewer's opinion, the best film of the year.

After a week of reflecting on Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris' film, I realized that this was a rarity in filmmaking where enormous chances are taken, and they all work. Consider a great scene from the film: Grandpa dies, and the body is at the hospital. They cannot leave the body there, and through a series of bizarre events manages to slide the body out of the window so that they can continue their journey to California so that Olive can perform in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. In a lesser movie, this scene would have turned into a horrible unrealistic screenwriting disaster—in Little Miss Sunshine, it maintains its realism while teasing us to discredit it. Each scene, as silly or unconventional as it is—and there are many—remains credible throughout.

Yet that still does not answer the question of the film's mystery. The film reaches greatness primarily because if its characters. They are so rich, so humane, so filled with little details that in the whole movie, there is never one false note of characterization. These are the most richly complex and detailed characters I have seen in an American movie in a long while. Most of the cast is obvious; the father who only wants to associate with "winners," the uncle who tried to kill himself, the wife who tries to maintain order in the household, the grandpa who buys porn and makes wisecracks at everything and everybody and the ten year old daughter, who gives the film's best performance, as she tries to love her family while still managing to keep her sanity. But even the son, who does not talk for most of the movie, gives an impeccable performance, is filled with interesting traits and keeps to the major themes of the film: he does not like his family; his future ambition is to be a pilot; he is a reject (he wears a T-Shirt saying "Jesus was Wrong").

In the movie's opening scenes, they effectively develop all of the characters in a realistic manner as they prepare for dinner in an average bourgeoisie household. Just how real is this scene? Have we not all experienced it thousands upon thousands of times? Yet the people involved in making Little Miss Sunshine have taken something extremely normal and used this as the first major set piece to develop a feature-length movie.

This family is more like each of our families than most of like would like to believe, just as the Marcello character in Fellini's famous La Dolce Vita is a better allegory for Western Civilization than most people would understand watching the movie only once. The miracle of the film is that it manages to build characters through realistic events, maintains them, and brings them all together in a final, characterizing revolutionary sequence in the most unlikely of places—a beauty pageant.

The journey across America is the film's centerpiece—it connects all of the little scenes together, and at the end of the troupe's travels, they reach the beauty pageant, barely make it on time, and see their ten years old-daughter embark on a dance sequence taught to her by her crazy Grandpa. The dance is very sexy and revealing, and everyone in the audience is gasping. In one of the film's many great scenes, the father stares at his daughter (whom he told earlier not to eat ice cream because it will make her fat and that there's "no point entering the pageant if she doesn't think she can win") and gets up on the stage and begins to dance with her. This man, like the rest of his family, has come to the end of a long, excruciating, but meaningful journey, and he finally realizes, at the end of the lengthy road, that there is much more to life than winning. Words are not used to convey this message, but instead, the emotions and actions of the characters; and that is more powerful than any dialogue possible. When asked about the dance, and who taught it to her, young Olive replies: "My Grandpa." "Oh, and where is he right now?" The answer: "In our trunk."

I love Little Miss Sunshine; it is the warmest, most humane movie that Hollywood has produced in many, many years. My favourite movie of all time was brought to mind while watching it: Ingmar Bergman's legendary Wild Strawberries about a man near the end of his life who begins a journey across Sweden to receive an honorary award for his work in science, as he encounters flashbacks and fantasies, dreams and nightmares, and by the end of the journey, he is a different, more wiser person. That film, for me, has always defined the episodes present in each of our lives and Little Miss Sunshine, I think, comes the closest to representing the modern and American version of what Bergman was getting at. At the end of their journey across America, this family will never be the same.

I think Little Miss Sunshine is a great movie, one that will disappear in the shadows of Hollywood because it is too real for our popular culture who prefers celebrity gossip to news, and reality television to thought-provoking drama. It is mistakenly referred to as a comedy, but it is actually more of human comedy, that Louis Bunuel would have been pleased to view. It indirectly attacks our values as a nation versus what they should be, as so many Bunuel movies did, especially during times of rapid change.

The Oscars are a week away. I would argue that this film will win—and deserves to win—the Best Picture Award. The other four nominees: Letters From Iwo Jima, yet another war movie which builds characters, but then fails to draw together its themes; Babel, a film where there's much less going on than meets the eye and perhaps the most dull, pretentious American film of the year; The Queen, a film with excellent acting, but has no background information on any of its main themes; and finally Martin Scorsese's Departed which was also an incredible tour de force, but I still prefer to see Little Miss Sunshine take home the prize. This film dives into the American psyche better than any movie I have ever seen. Let's see if the Academy gets it right this year, but I have my doubts.